Thursday, May 14, 2015

James Hutton and John Playfair and a genealogical connection

I'm reading Eternal Ephemera by Niles Eldredge and learning about the early history of evolution and geology. Eldredge describes the work of James Hutton who is known as the father of modern geology. Here's the Wikipedia description of his work ...

He originated the theory of uniformitarianism—a fundamental principle of geology—which explains the features of the Earth's crust by means of natural processes over geologic time. Hutton's work established geology as a proper science, and thus he is often referred to as the "Father of Modern Geology".[2][3]

Through observation and carefully reasoned geological arguments, Hutton came to believe that the Earth was perpetually being formed; he recognised that the history of the Earth could be determined by understanding how processes such as erosion and sedimentation work in the present day. His theories of geology and geologic time,[4] also called deep time,[5] came to be included in theories which were called plutonism and uniformitarianism.

Hutton's work would not have been widely known if it hadn't been promoted by an Edinburgh professor named John Playfair (left). He published Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth in 1802.

Eldredge describes Edinburgh University in the `1820's when Darwin was a student (p. 44).

The "deep time" revealed in Hutton's work, and his direct stimulus to the later work of Charles Lyell, which in turn had had such an effect on the young Darwin, was an utterly necessary precondition for the serious contemplation of the history of life on earth. Small wonder, then, that Edinburgh's intellectual environment also fostered equivalent, radical ideas in zoology, as they had a generation earlier in geology.

But the story of Darwin's mentors in medical school, and what he himself absorbed while he was there, was far less known in the 1960s than the saga of Hutton (and his "Boswell," John Playfair). I was ignorant of all of this, but should not have been particularly surprised when I finally learned, in the first decade of this century, of the foment around transmutational ideas that seethed in Edinburgh. The creative intellectual ferment of Edinburgh in science in the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth had carried on in biological topics in the 1830s.

Sounds like John Playfair might have belonged to a bunch of radical professors. He might have been as unconventional in his thinking as his brother (the ancestor of my children).

I suppose it shouldn't come as a big surprise that Ms. Sandwalk and my son and my daughter descend from people who were very radical and independent and probably never did as they were told.

Oldies but goodies! We have to remember these courageous pioneers, and give them, flaws and all, their due. Buffon and Diderot, I understand, were attacked by the clergy in France, and in 1840s radical English evolutionists were sent to prison for blasphemy. pdfs of Hutton's and Playfair's original works are available, I believe, at archive(dot)org.

AMEN. these geology ideas WAS a precondition for Darwin. or rather his ideas are founded on geology and not biology. without the geology the biology can't work. then the error was made that the biology was established as scientiofic when it was the geology that was the evidence for evolution. a still continuing flaw of scientific investigation in this subject.

by the way. There were alreadty many thinkers in Scotland dealing with geology.Hutton just was anointed as having defeated them and then given the crown as a creator of geology. He wasn't. Others did a better job and insisted in Genesis being true. Scotland was very puritan/evangelical in its educated circles. In fact the origin for a higher curve in their intellect relative to England.

Hutton was wrong in so much. He too quickly drew conclusions about mechanisms for geological movements. he saw slow actions creating valleys that today we would say were created quickly by glacial release.He showed a lack of imagination by too quickly seeing only one option. Je was hostile to creationism as he was known as not living a Christian life.The great unconformity is case in point. its easily explained by later ideas of continental drift which is easily explained by biblical flood scenarios of fast continental pulling/and colliding.Very few people thought about these things in those days and thats why incompetent research was done. Hutton being a big example.

Evolutionary biology is not scientific if it in any way makes its case as being scientific if it invokes a different field of enquiry namely geology.The bagpipes must moan a groan over the moors over Huttons demise as a premier geologist.

The first faltering attempt at a genetic theory of evolution based on something akin to natural selection was made by French physicist Pierre Maupertuis in the early 1750s. This was first shown to English speakers by biology historian Arthur O. Lovejoy in 1905, shortly after the Flood.

Sorry Robert, floods wouldn't affect continental drift. The forces that affect drift occur at depths that average between 100 and 220 kilometers, far below anything touched by floods on the surface. See http://geology.about.com/od/platetectonics/a/About-Plate-Tectonics.htm .

At risk of going off thread i will say indeed it wasn't the waters. Just another situation going on with the single original continent breaking up. This was needed also to be the mechanism for creating segregated flow events to bring segregated deposition results. the strata layers.Hutton was sloppy with leaving his puritan science heritage.

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Subscribe to Sandwalk

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.